Tools for Research

There are two main tools that may help in writing this book and doing further research together.

The database “Heraudica”

This database goes back to my time at the German Historical Institute in Paris, where I created this database for a project called “Les hérauts d’armes dans les sources bourguignons (1386-1519)”. In the context of this project, the database was enriched with texts by Nils Bock, Henri Simonneau, Franck Viltart, Georges-Xavier Blary and myself. What we did was to collect all the mentions of heralds we could find in Burgundian sources (Historiography, account books, etc.) and to include them in full text in the database, connecting each of them with a set of well-chosen keywords. Further, we extracted all the information about the different offices and their incumbents, so that this database is both a thematic source collection as well as a prosopography of the office of arms. It applies not only to Burgundy but for many other countries, since we registered every mention of a herald, be it a Burgundian one or a herald from abroad. In its current state, the database now contains information on almost 300 persons and 600 offices, assembling more than 10,000 source extracts, 7,000 of them, concerning Burgundy, are ready to be published. The database shall be opened to all the participants so that we can enrich this data pool and widen its range adequate to the scope of the workshop.

Bibliography on Zotero

In connection with the workshop I opened a group on Zotero which is a free, easy-to-use tool, offering the opportunity to share and work on a collaborative bibliography. For a starter, I have integrated the bibliographical database of our former research project “Les hérauts d’armes dans les sources bourguignonnes” (more than 500 bibliographical notes). Since then, it has been enriched by a number of participants so that we are now at about 580 titles. What is urgently needed is some systematical basic tagging of those titles in English (already time and regions would do).

Torsten Hiltmann is Juniorprofessor for the High and Late Middle Ages and Auxiliary Sciences at the University of Münster. He is interested in medieval and early modern visual communication and heraldry, the medieval notion of kingship and the methods and technologies of Digital Humanities.

History of Heralds in Europe (12th – 18th c.)

This blog supports a workshop and a collaborative book project on the history of heralds in Europe (12th-18th c.). It informs about the progress of the project and provides a platform of exchange and discussion to the participants as well as to everyone interested in this under-explored subject.